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DECEMBER 29-30, 2012
Volume 12 Issue 42
Santa Monica Daily Press
DON’T KNOW WHAT TO POP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE? SEE PAGE 10
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THE SAY CHEESE ISSUE
City Hall seeks new owner for mobile home park BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
CITY HALL City Hall has made it clear over the past several years that it never intended to be in the mobile home park business. Now, it’s clear that it wants to get out. City officials are exploring options to divest Santa Monica of its stake in the Mountain View Mobile Home Park, a 4.8acre park with 105-rent controlled and deedrestricted mobile home pads. The City Council purchased the park in 2000 from the Ring Trading Corp. for roughly $7 million to settle a lawsuit with the company and the tenants related to an SEE SELL PAGE 6
2012: A year of turbulence and altered landscapes BY JUSTIN POPE Associated Press
It was a year of storms, of raging winds and rising waters, but also broader turbulence that strained our moorings. Our atmosphere, our politics, our economy — rarely in memory have they seemed in such constant agitation. Our emotions, too. In the year’s final weeks, amid a torrent of tears in a heartbroken Connecticut town, a rush of grief seemed to wash over all of us from the shooting deaths of 20 children and six adults in an elementary school, and of the shooter’s mother in her home. The senselessness and loss plumbed depths of sorrow and outrage we had not felt, together, for many years. But if 2012 battered us with floods and tempests, and seemed especially dark in its final days, it was also perhaps more distinctively a year of mornings after, when clouds parted and dawn’s light fell upon altered landscapes. Surveying the changes, we were sometimes sanguine, at other times distraught. There were, of course, the storms themselves, taking not just ferocious but sometimes freakish forms. Americans saw an SEE YEAR PAGE 9
Daniel Archuleta daniela@smdp.com
NICE BACKDROP: The Santa Monica Pier made Instagram's top 10 list of places people took pictures of in 2012 using the smartphone app.
Santa Monica Pier an Instagram hot spot BY KEVIN HERRERA Editor-in-Chief
SM PIER The iconic Santa Monica Pier ranks with the Eiffel Tower, Disneyland and Times Square when it comes to the most popular places in the world in 2012 to take pictures with the Instagram smartphone app. According to the company’s blog, the pier and its world-famous Ferris wheel and inspirational views of the Pacific Ocean ranked 10th on the list. The Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand topped the list with more than 100,000 photos taken, followed by the Siam Paragon shopping mall, also in Bangkok. Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. came in
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third, followed by New York City’s Times Square, the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park, Los Angeles International Airport, Dodger Stadium, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Staples Center and the pier. Log onto Instagram’s live photo feed to see the most recent photos of the pier — www.gramfeed.com/instagram/places/3001 340 For those who have been living under a rock, Instagram is one of the most popular apps around, with millions of users who love to snap photos with it and alter them with scores of filters that can make even the most boring picture look interesting. It’s so popular that Facebook, the social networking site, paid $1 billion for it. Instagram did come under fire this
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month when it announced that it would allow Facebook to let companies pay to place users’ photos in advertisements that would run with the app. Some celebrities who make money on endorsement deals were outraged and threatened to ditch the app. Instagram withdrew the change, but not without losing some 4 million daily users, according to information by AppData, a metrics website. Officials with Instagram said the AppData figures are simply not true. AppData’s figures only account for users who log into Instagram using their Facebook account. That doesn’t account for users who log in using just their e-mail addresses. kevinh@smdp.com